How to Make Your Blog Post Go Viral

The other day in Maker Hunt’s Slack group, an entrepreneur asked the #content channel to read through his Medium post before he submitted it to TNW, FastCompany, Entrepreneur and other similar publications.

My answers to Gabe’s questions elicited positive responses, in the form of “Publish that ish.”

--ADVERTISEMENT--

The result is this post on content distribution, in which I tell you how I make my posts popular through nine distribution tactics.

But first, let’s start with Gabe’s first question.

How do you submit content to to be published to popular sites?

I’m going to be a Debbie Downer for a moment and say that getting published is effing hard; i.e. it’s very likely you won’t get published on your first try.

And unless your Medium post goes viral, or unless you’re Paul Jarvis, it’s highly unlikely big publications – such as any of the ones mentioned above – will republish something that has already been published somewhere else.

No one wants sloppy seconds, plus this leads to duplicate content, which is bad for SEO. I certainly know as an editor, I do NOT like ever syndicating content unless it’s really good stuff.

Typically, you’ll have to create a buzz around your Medium post before it will get syndicated.

You can’t just post it and hope it gets traction or that some big publication will seed through all the noise and find it.

How do you make your posts popular besides writing good content?

I am a member of a few different Slack groups. SitePoint actually just wrote a post about the 12 best Slack communities for entrepreneurs here. You can also view a directory of popular Slack chats here.

Quibb accepts a mere 40 percent of applicants, but even still, I recommend signing up because it emails you great content daily. If you aren’t a Quibb member, find someone who is and share your really great post with them.

3. Share on social media.

For social media, it’s vital that your “share statement” is fantastic, i.e. it makes social media users click-through to your post or at least like it or retweet it. The reason you want your “share statement” to be so amazing is because social media algorithms tend to favor links that get more likes, clicks, etc. fast.

Lauren Holliday is a full-stack marketer, SitePoint's business and marketing editor and the founder of Freelanship, which connects students with project-based internships. Learn more about Lauren on her website.